Several US officers who failed to properly supervise the suspected gunman who shot dead 13 people at the Fort Hood military base should be held accountable, an inquiry said Friday.

"As a result of our review, it appeared that there were several officers who did not apply the army's policies to the perpetrator," said Togo West, a former army secretary, who led the review with a former chief of naval operations, Vernon Clark.

The report released Friday recommended the US Army secretary carry out "an accountability review" for those officers, which could include disciplinary measures.

Military and intelligence officials have come under criticism for possibly missing warning signs about US Army Major Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist charged with the 13 murders in the November 5 attack at the military base in Texas.

Hasan is being investigated for links to Islamic extremism, including his contacts with a radical cleric now in Yemen who blessed the killing spree.

West declined to offer more details about the conduct of the officers overseeing Hasan and that the probe had not identified them by name.

But he said US Army leaders would not have difficulty concluding which officers needed to come under scrutiny based on the report, which included sections that were not released publicly.

The report also said "some medical officers failed to apply appropriate judgment and standards" in assessing Hasan.

In personnel evaluations, medical officers failed to take into account Hasan's overall conduct and instead focused only on his academic work, the report said.

The probe did not look at the role of intelligence agencies in tracking Hasan's contacts with the radical cleric, Anwar al-Aulaqi, which is the subject of another review.

But the report did say joint terrorism task forces needed to be improved and that more military officers should be assigned to them.

Contacts between Hasan and the cleric were picked up by government agencies before the shooting but the US Army was not informed about the link.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised the report and said he had ordered immediate steps to be taken based on the findings.

The review portrayed the Pentagon as badly prepared for internal threats and that it failed to share information with commanders about personnel.

The report shows "shortcomings in the way the department is prepared to defend against threats posed by external influences operating on members of our military community," Gates told reporters.

He said he did not believe possible radicals within the military's ranks posed a major threat.

But he said "clearly one is too many."

The Pentagon's policies and methods were outdated and the department needed to adapt to new threats that appeared after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Gates said.

"It is clear that as a department, we have not done enough to adapt to the evolving domestic internal security threat to American troops and military facilities that has emerged over the past decade," he said.

"In this area, as in so many others, this department is burdened by 20th century processes and attitudes, mostly rooted in the Cold War."

The government's counter-intelligence procedures were "mostly designed to combat an external threat such as a foreign intelligence service," he said.

But the report praised the rapid response to the shooting at Fort Hood, saying that within four minutes and 10 seconds of the first emergency call, the attack was stopped and the suspected gunman disarmed.

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